2ND LD: Cram school teacher gets 18-years for slaying pupil aged 12.

KYOTO, March 6 Kyodo

(EDS: ADDING MORE DETAILS AT 8TH GRAF)

A former part-time cram school teacher was sentenced to 18 years in prison Tuesday for stabbing a 12-year-old female student to death in 2005 at the school in Uji, Kyoto Prefecture.

The incident shocked Japan and led the cram-school industry to review classroom safety and baselines for hiring teachers.

Yu Hagino, 24, stabbed Sayano Horimoto, a sixth-grade elementary school student, in the neck and other parts of the body with a kitchen knife when they were alone in the cram school classroom on the morning of Dec. 10, 2005, according to the ruling by the Kyoto District Court.

''This is a highly unusual case in which a teacher killed a student at a cram school that should have been safe. But the cruelty of the crime is beyond description,'' Presiding Judge Makoto Himuro said in handing down the ruling.

Himuro dismissed the defense lawyers' argument that Hagino was mentally incompetent at the time of the crime, holding him fully responsible for his actions, which the court concluded was planned.

The defendant had prepared the knife used and pulled the plug on a monitoring camera so as not to be interrupted by other students or teachers, the judge said.

The court, however, did not accept prosecutors' demand that Hagino get life imprisonment, with Himuro saying he has development problems, had mental trouble at the time of the crime and surrendered afterward by making an emergency call to the police.

''The defendant, who is affected by Asperger syndrome -- a congenital pervasive development disorder -- and is characterized by weakness in times of stress, was in a condition similar to mental disorder at the time of the crime,'' the judge said. The disorder causes patients to exhibit autistic-like behavior.

The victim's father, Tsunehide Horimoto, 43, said in a press conference, ''The sentence is too light.''

After the defendant pleaded guilty and his mental competency became a major issue during the trial, a psychiatric test was conducted and found him mentally competent.

During the proceedings, Hagino told the court that he was upset by the victim's parents filing a complaint in May 2005 about his way of teaching, and that he then had a hallucination of the girl attacking him with a dagger.

But the court ruled that Himuro was capable of distinguishing between the illusion and the real girl.